Ruckus aims at Smart WiFi scaling challenges

bf ruckus product announcements 1-28-13 SAN FRANCISCO--Ruckus Wireless Monday (Jan. 28) rolled out a new
product and announced a technology enhancement which together are
designed to ease administration and improve performance of Smart
WiFi networks.

The new product, SmartWay, addresses the scaling challenges inherent
in Apple Bonjour and UPnP networks as the number of wireless mobile
devices increases.

SmartWay helps organizations with Apple devices using services such
as AirPlay and AirPrint discover and communicate more easily with
each other. SmartWay is integrated with Ruckus' ZoneFlex software,
allowing multicast traffic to be managed and directed without
overloading a network.

"Let's say you have a school where the teachers are required to use
802.1x for user name and password authentication," said Alf Watt,
Ruckus manager of mobile applications. "They want to access Apple TV,
which does not expose support for that. The devices are not going to
see each other."

Unless the teacher's device and the Apple TV device are on the same
network and subnet, they won't communicate, Watt said.

"We're able to selectively pick which types of services we want to
expose to which networks," Watt added.

Ruckus also rolled out BeamFlex+--an enhancement to its BeamFlex
technology--which addresses the problem in multicast networks in
which mobile-device performance can be diminished because of the
always-changing orientation of the antennae. Its
"polarization-agnostic" approach uses maximal ratio combining
technology to improve signal reception from different orientations.